What can publishers do when they track down the "leaker"? My banks were hacked a few times last three years. (When a new-numbered credit card replacement sent to you without asking, you know somethings were wrong.) Even banks can not secure their system, can publishers really pursuit consumers over one book?

This at least hints at one of the problems with a watermarking scheme. You'd need not only the publisher, but also the retailer, to simultaneously decide that the negative publicity from suing a customer is worth it. AFAIK Amazon won't even give the New York Times the names of their subscribers. They're probably just as unwilling to give up these names.

Quote:

Even banks can not secure their system, can publishers really pursuit consumers over one book?

There must be people in prison despite their lawyers arguing that bank records, put in evidence by the prosecution, are unreliable. And a few may be actually innocent!

While the book industry could try to go after customers, it wouldn't be pleasant. One beauty of DRM is that you can deter some of the privacy without having to feel bad for the customers you jail or bankrupt. I know some here think publishing executives are a cold-hearted group who would sell their mothers in return for agency pricing at Amazon. If so, you'll find this paragraph implausible.

I see nothing to suggest this scheme...if were ever intended to be applied commercially at all...was intended for literature or main stream books. I'd guess that if it's anything more than an experiment, it's for government reports or the like.

Send legal-sounding threatening letters demanding money or they will sue you.
They won't actually sue anybody, just hope enough people are scared into paying protection money.
Or at least that is what the film industry have done.

I suspect this is a hoax. Fraunhofer is real, SiDiM is real, but where is the thing that says what the implementation of SiDiM is? A screenshot posted on a blog?

'fraid not. The screenshots are from a .pdf file hosted at the official web site of the German Publishers and Booksellers' Association.
According to the metadata information, the .pdf file itself was created by the CoSee GmbH, a spinoff of the Fraunhofer Institute that specializes in digital watermarking solutions.